Ah @ecotrain, another ball of tangled twine for us to unravel! I love these questions of the week, and if you are reading this, please know that anyone can answer them. This week's question is a super curly one. I feel that the more I unravel it, the more I get tangled, and there's a lot more I want to say than I have time for right now.

To answer this question, it's really easy to say that we DO have too much freedom. We seem to love travelling the world, to vote freely, to say what we feel, or to our life partners freely, to choose a job anywhere in the world, to be friends with who they like. And this has been the story of my life, to a large extent. So yay, western culture and all it's freedoms.

However, how free is it? And is too much freedom leading to problems that we can't fix?

In my mind (and knowing the QOTW, we're all going to have different approaches!), I have to start by looking at this part of the question:

What is the health of our western culture?

Firstly, I'm going to ignore 'and state' because it makes this too big a question to ask - 'state' in general? State of what? Most 'states' will come back to health anyway - both physical and psychological. For example, a culture that puts economy above it's people will inevitably have increased rates of despair and depression. So let's look instead at the 'health state'.

This too incredibly hard question to answer, because as I've participated in this global Steem community, it's becoming more and more clear that it's difficult to generalise about what western culture is and what defines it. Certainly, for Australians, we are living longer than ever before, with a better quality of life and more years of good health than ever before and most of us say we enjoy good health, and rate our health well. So by this report, our the health of our western culture is pretty good, compared to America, where:

The new average life expectancy for Americans is 78.7 years, which puts the U.S. behind other developed nations and 1.5 years lower than the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average life expectancy of 80.3. The OECD is a group of developed countries that includes Canada, Germany, Mexico, France, Japan, and the U.K.

Yet, cancer is our biggest killer, second only to cardiovascular disease. A staggering 63 percent of us are obese, and something like 20 percent of children. The biggest killer of men is heart disease, and half of us have a chronic condition that's responsible for most deaths. And this is all despite Australia having one of the best health care systems in the world (and please, let us hold onto that). One in four Australians under 24 have a mental health issue. A third of woman and a quarter of men in this country have a mental health disorder.

For some of us, freedom actually improves our health, not makes it worse.

In Australian, like in many western nations, there are different health outcomes according to your socioeconomic position. The poorer tend to have worse health than the middle class and the rich. Research shows that the poor are far more likely to suffer from disease and less access to preventative health services. The advantaged simply have more freedom - more money, more education, and better access to health. There are far less limitations on their lives than the less fortunate or socially mobile. Low income can impact on living standards, reduce access to health services, and given an increased feeling of insecurity or control over one's life which can cause physical and psychological distress and reduced well-being. And of course, those with chronic conditions can't earn enough to make their lives better. In both cases, it's lack of freedom that disables and causes the onset of poorer health.

Being indigenous in Australia too means that you will:

• won't live as long as other Australians (60 compared to around 80)
• have higher rates of infant mortality (4 times higher than the national rate)
• have lower education and employment
• be far more likely to experience domestic violence
• be far more likely to have chronic disease
• be doubly likely to die in childbirth than a white Australian woman
• be twice as likely to commit suicide
• have a weekly income about 300 dollars less than other Australians

Of course, this has many underlying causes, much of which is intergenerational trauma, as explained here:

“The relatively high rates of violence in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities are influenced by immediate factors such as alcohol and illicit drug use, mental health issues and childhood experience of violence. However, a number of researchers also suggest that deeper underlying causes include ‘intergenerational trauma’ resulting from the ongoing and cumulative effects of colonisation, loss of land, language and culture, the erosion of cultural and spiritual identity, forced removal of children, and racism and discrimination.”

Loss of land, culture and identity causing trauma? That's lack of freedom causing profound damage, rather than having too much freedom.

So it very much depends on what part of Western culture you are talking about. I am sure you will find similar statistic in disenfranchised, socially crippled and disadvantaged groups in America.

Do our kids have too much freedom?

This is the classic 'youth of today' cry where people look at the new generations and accuse them of having too much freedom that's essentially ruining them. Yet are they as free as those that have come before them? The lament that kids aren't as safe in this world is a common one, as is the fact they spend too much time on technology. Both things are true - depression and anxiety as a direct result of social media and cyber bullying is one of the leading causes of teen suicide in Australia. However, this is far more because we've allowed them to shut down their worlds, allowed them to limit their worlds rather than giving them this freedom. Giving a kid an iphone at 9 with unlimited access is not being a free and liberal parent - it's preventing them exploring nature, testing boundaries in new experiences, learning through books.

Teenagers also don't have the freedom to choose the future many of us luxuriating in. They don't have the right to vote on policies that will affect them. The teenagers at my school hated that the government had the right to veto same sex marriage because within two years it would affect them. They're the ones inheriting the earth and feeling powerlessness because every day the planet suffers and they're told about climate change as inevitability and are powerlessness to affect change. And that, by the way, goes for many of us - we're powerlessness to affect the big decisions made by governments that screw us all over. No wonder that western culture has a high rate of substance abuse - lacking power and freedom to change our worlds, we may as well escape them.

And by the way, this would happen whether we limited drugs or not, to be honest - how successful was the war on drugs? What a load of bollocks. If anything, they should be conducting war against the pharma companies that create the opiates to which so many are addicted, trying to escape the world that was never anyone's genuine, free choosing.

So are we living in an illusionary free world?

If we are lucky enough to be born into a fairly well off life, with a good job and holiday pay, and good access to health care, we could argue that we're far more free than those less advantaged that us.

However, we forget we're slaves to a system that likes us to participate in it - go to university (and end up with over 50 grand in debt), get a job, buy a house, buy a car, have kids, send them to uni, and so on. We're trapped in these cycles because the economic, political and social forces that be funnel us into these routes.

Media and advertising are often to blame in making us feel as if we are lacking, and must buy bigger houses, drive more expensive cars and generally keep up with the Jones, the Smiths, the Kardashians and every other sod on this planet we're made to feel less than. We work more, and harder, for longer (and in Australia, our wages are not going up to meet the cost of living). We think we're free because we have the luxury of choice, or the illusion of it, but all of that stuff is just making us sicker. In a consumer society, we wallow in things, pretty and sparkly and beautiful things that don't make us happy. We define ourselves by valuing the things we are acquire, constantly chasing 'the dream'. We might have the opportunity and the illusion of freedom as we do so, but we're trapped. And if any of us manage to escape that, it's a battle, at the risk of social exclusion or spending your whole life fighting to be outside the system that restrains us in the first place.

Thus, we aren't really free at all.

How else are we 'not free'?

We still live in a society where black lives are far more at risk than white ones. We still live in a society where homophobia is rife. We still live in a society of discrimination and prejudice, perhaps more so as the media makes us fear the 'other' more than ever in a politicised world where governments attempt to win votes by pretending they'll make us safe from imaginary evils. We still in a world where woman are scared to walk the streets at night, or are quite likely to suffer sexual abuse, violence and rape.

So if you're in one of these affected groups, how free are you, really?

But hang on, does a more liberal society cause health issues?

This is a whole other can of worms. I could talk for a long time about this, but I won't, because I think others are going to answer this question for me (in some interesting ways). I'm on the fence a little about this one, and need to contemplate it more fully. I fear that I'll go off track even more than I fear I have.

However, in summary, I'd say that the state of our western culture, and thus it's health, is due to a lack of freedom, not a surplus of it.

How do we free ourselves? How do we free others? Now that could be the basis for another @ecotrain question of the week!

Over and out - it's your turn now! What do you think?

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